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Digital 101: Comic Book Style
Continuing from basic colors blocked in...
At this point I would assume you have already blocked in the basic colors as described in the Digital 101: Basic Coloring tutorial. You may also wish to look at the Shading 101 tutorial as proper shading can really improve a picture!
Special thanks to ~Refleximage for use of his line art for some of the examples used below.
Inking Styles
One of the most visible elements in "comic book" style artwork (I'm talking about "American" comic book style) is the inking. Because many comic books are creating by a team of people (Penciller, Inker, and Colorist) a good inker with not "pass the buck" (so to speak) to the colorist. In other words, a good inker will do their best to make things look 3D and textured in the Ink. Of course each inker has their own distinctive style. A picture with "normal" inking is shown at the left and one with my variation of comic book inking added below (I added the additional inking using Painter 7's Pen tools).
On to the coloring...
One way of coloring is to use a large soft airbush to lay in the basic shadows and highlights and then using selections and the dodge tool (see Coloring Techniques #1 for examples showing how to do this). Below is one example of using that technique for armor:
The dodge tool (as in the above example) creates very shinny, bright highlights. While these may be fine for metal objects, other materials (such a fabrics) are less shinny. You can create a lighter effect as in the examples below by shading using the airbrush in the selections instead of the dodge tool. In this case be sure to shade softly using the hardest pressure at the center and working out from that softly. In the example "glove" below I show the same highlights with soft and solid shading. With some practice you may even wish to use soft and solid shading like these, as well as the dodge tool technique all in the same picture (for different types of materials).
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